[rhelv6-list] You suggestion for 'big' filesystem management Best Practice?

[Peter Ruprecht]

Greg Swift wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 11:30, Masopust, Christian 
> <christian.masopust at siemens.com <mailto:christian.masopust at siemens.com>> 
> wrote:
> 
> 
>      > Götz Reinicke wrote:
>      > > Hi,
>      > >
>      > > we plan to set up a big file storage for media files like
>      > uncompressed
>      > > movies from student film projects, dvd images etc.
>      > >
>      > > It should be some sort of archive and will not bee accessed
>      > by more than
>      > > may be 5 people at the same time.
>      > >
>      > > The iSCSI RAID we have is about 26TB netto and I'm again
>      > faced with the
>      > > question: How many partitions, which filesystem, which
>      > mount options etc.
>      > >
>      > > For the User it would be the most simpel thing, to have one big
>      > > filesystem she/he could fill with all the data and dont has
>      > to search
>      > > e.g. on multiple volumes.
>      > >
>      > > On the other hand, if one big filesystem crashes or has do
>      > be checked it
>      > > will destroy a lot of data or the check will take hours ...
>      > >
>      > >
>      > > Any suggestions pro or cons are welcome! :-)
>      > >
>      > > My favourite for now is 3 to 4 filesystems with the default ext4
>      > > settings. (Redhat EL 5.7, may be soon 6.1)
>      > >
>      > > Thanks and best regards. Götz
>      >
>      > If you decide to go with RHEL6, xfs is a good bet for making one big
>      > filesystem.  We have a setup similar to what you're
>      > describing and have
>      > had very solid stability and performance using xfs (default
>      > filesystem
>      > and mount settings.)  As far as I can see (and knocking on
>      > wood), xfs is
>      > now a lot less flaky than it seemed to be in the past.
>      >
>      >   -Peter
> 
>     I can approve what Peter mentioned. I've been using xfs on my
>     CentOS 5 system with 2 16TB arrays (each holding one single filesystem)
>     for several years with absolutely no issues!
> 
> 
> So in his intial request he mentioned concern about fsck times.  How has 
> this been for you guys (Christian and Peter) ?
> 
> fwiw, I'm actually mixing both xfs with 30+TB total file system and 
> gluster in a different use case...  I just haven't had to fsck a system 
> yet so I am very curious about how that is performing for others.
> 
> -greg

In testing, I purposely crashed the system while under light-moderate 
I/O load, and the xfs fs didn't need any recovery when it was remounted. 
  I don't have any real-world experience with how long it would take to 
xfs_check and xfs_repair a fs of that size that had gotten corrupted, 
sorry.  Though I will not be disappointed if I manage to avoid gaining 
that experience!

  -Peter